“I place Montaigne foremost among those dissemblers who mean to deceive by telling the truth. He portrays himself with defects, but he gives himself only lovable ones.” If Montaigne, misleads the reader, then it is not he but Rousseau who is the first person in history to write an honest and full account of himself. This frees Rousseau to say, of his own book, “This is the only portrait of a man, painted exactly according to nature and in all its truth, that exists and will probably ever exist.”
